Foil – Electric Vehicle 2009
This will be a collection of design information, videos, and photos of Foil, the autonomous device I designed and built for the Electric Vehicle event of Science Olympiad. It won first place at the state tournament in New York, beating the second-place team that went on to place #2 at the National Tournament.
Foil is designed to travel an exact distance specified at competition, in the range of 5.0 to 10.0 meters, down a track as straightly as possible, while modulating its speed so that each run down the track takes exactly 45.0 seconds; no more, no less. Each of those parameters can be fine-tuned at the competition site using an embedded interface consisting of a mechanical rotary encoder with a knob, pushbuttons, and an onboard LCD display. Foil is powered by a PIC24HJ128GP502 microcontroller, obtained from Microchip, Inc. as a free sample of their high-performance 16-bit PIC24H line, running custom C code I wrote for the Microchip C30 compiler, based off of GCC.
Foil was able to travel down a 7.6 meter long track and stop exactly on the finish line, and regulated its speed so that it tried to stopped 45.0 seconds after I started it. It missed this time by 0.13 seconds, for a 0.29% error. Its forward pointer, however, was about 2 millimeters to the right and 2 millimeters off (a 0.03% error) in finish line distance. The resulting score is officially 199.53 out of 200.
I consider Electric Vehicle to be one of the most worthwhile challenges of Science Olympiad, and so I have given a lot of attention to my own entry. In addition, I’ve documented the design & development, software, and building process in various formats (including video), and I plan to compile, edit, and release that documentation now that the competition season is over for me.
More information for Foil is not yet available at this time, because I have been very busy. For now, enjoy a CAD rendering and a video of the gold-medal run at NYSSO states.
Click for full size (1920 × 1200)
You can find additional media at the Science Olympiad Student Center’s Image Gallery: http://gallery.scioly.org/categories.php?cat_id=26
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